Spain to be 1st in Europe to file suit vs. Big Tobacco

August 20, 2001|By David Holley, Special to the Tribune. David Holley is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune newspaper.

GRANADA, Spain — A badly overweight, middle-aged man casually was puffing on a cigarette as he stood near the "Smoking Prohibited in This Center" signs plastered on the closed windows of Ruiz de Alda Hospital.

The head of the hospital's smoking prevention unit, Ana Romero Ortiz, walked past the smoker without saying a word to him. Instead, she complained to a visitor that "the managers don't do anything to avoid this."

She said she occasionally asks violators to stop, and sometimes they reply that they just saw a doctor or nurse breaking the same rules.

It is still a tough life for anti-tobacco activists in Spain, where non-smokers generally eschew the forceful assertion of rights often favored in the United States. But that might be changing, even here in the Andalusia region of southern Spain, where smoking was introduced to Europe shortly after Christopher Columbus arrived in America.

The Andalusia government recently announced plans to file a lawsuit next month against five major international tobacco corporations, seeking reimbursement for the public health expenses incurred to treat smokers. Backers and local media say the lawsuit, modeled on successful litigation by state governments in the United States, would be the first of its kind in Europe.

Francisco Vallejo, head of the Andalusia Health Department, said the main goals of the planned lawsuit will be to prove a legal responsibility of tobacco companies for health-care costs and to set a precedent.

The five corporations to be targeted are Philip Morris, Brown & Williamson, the Canary Islands' Cita, the French-Spanish company Altadis and Japan's JT International, which together produce more than 90 percent of the cigarettes sold in Andalusia, he said.

"If we get even a sentence that says these companies must pay for one X-ray, we will have won," Vallejo said.

The Madrid-based Tobacco Business Association, which represents the tobacco companies, issued a statement saying the suit has no legal basis. In the few smoking-related lawsuits previously brought against tobacco companies in Spain, judges have ruled against individual smokers or their families.

The Andalusia Health Department says it spends $315 million a year, or 8.5 percent of its total health-care bill, to treat people with smoking-related illnesses. It estimates that 10,000 people die each year from tobacco-related diseases out of a regional population of 7.3 million.